liminal Wins £50,000 New Music Award

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: PRS for Music Foundation

liminal, an arts practice led by composer David Prior and architect Frances Crow, has been named the winner of the prestigious PRS for Music Foundation New Music Award at a glittering ceremony at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London.

The biennial New Music Award, which began in 2005, goes to the most groundbreaking idea for a new musical work in any genre. The winner receives £50,000 to develop their idea and premiere it within a year. liminal’s winning entry - The Organ of Corti - introduces the concept of recycling existing sounds in already sound-saturated environments (the organ of Corti is part of the inner ear). The "music" it creates in any given location will be collected and filtered by a portable structure resembling a fairground organ.

With the help of Professor Keith Attenborough, an expert in the technology of sonic crystals, liminal hopes to challenge expectations of what might constitute a piece of music by offering new ways of listening to what is around us rather than adding sounds to the environment. The work will premiere at the City of London Festival in July 2011 and then travel to the Tebay Gorge in the Lake District, the Cotswold Water Park in Wiltshire and Diglis Weir in Worcester for three further performances.

The Organ of Corti was chosen from a shortlist of five ambitious new musical ideas by a panel of judges comprising music journalist Paul Morley, artist Martin Creed, singer and DJ Bishi, composer and pianist Michael Finnissy and pianist and conductor Joanna MacGregor.

Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts Writer for The Guardian and Chair of the judging panel, said: "After a long, sometimes difficult, and always stimulating debate, it was the judges' eventual – and unanimous – decision to award the prize to The Organ of Corti. The judges admired the quiet beauty of the idea of "recycling" sound in a world saturated by noise and overwhelmed by music. In a world obsessed by the glitz and glamour of large-scale, bells-and-whistles events, the thoughtful, discreet and gentle idea of the Organ of Corti utterly caught their imagination."

Sally Taylor, Chair of the PRS for Music Foundation, said: "The New Music Award is about looking beyond the obvious and the commercial and envisaging the music of the future. All five ideas on this year’s shortlist, which ranged from site-specific sound art to African-inspired human beatbox, captured this spirit of adventure and discovery. We intend also that they will spark a debate about the future of new music today. We would like to offer our congratulations to all of this year’s nominees and particularly to this year’s winner, liminal. We look forward to the premiere of their fantastic idea in 2011."

The New Music Award £50,000 prize money makes it financially more significant than both the Mercury and Turner Prizes and underlines the PRS for Music Foundation’s long-standing commitment to encouraging new music across all genres. As well as offering vital financial support to new music creators, performers, promoters, producers and organisations, the PRS for Music Foundation challenges established views about creative music-making in the UK and works to raise the profile of music innovators.

Previous winners of the New Music Award are The Fragmented Orchestra (2008) and Score for a Hole in the Ground by former Pogue Jem Finer (2005).

For further information, please visit: www.prsformusicfoundation.com/>